Writing, Productivity and Stats
My First 10 Days on Medium
Writing as a Hobby and How I Got 15K Views on Medium in 10 Days
A Story About My Journey on Medium and How I Started Writing
I recently registered and started writing on Medium, as I wanted to pick up a new hobby for quite some time now. Writing sounds perfect fas a hobby.
In the last couple of days, I received quite a high amount of views, reads, and fans.
Yes, you might call the title misleading as it’s only 14,436 Views :), but it’s just shy of 564 — and hey, it has been just 10 days!
I wasn’t sure if this was something unusual or if Medium has a great community and is very friendly to newcomers.
But the feeling of getting such an amount of views wasn’t familiar, as many other platforms are usually not that open to newcomers. Kudos Medium!
So, why write this story? I’m genuinely surprised by my stats, so first off for some reason I wanted to share this with the community. Besides that, I usually write technical stories related to software and engineering, so writing about something else feels good and feels even more of a hobby!
I want this story to serve me as a reference in the future so I can look back on the first 10 Days of my hobbyist journey, but I also want to note down some reminders, and details, do a mini-analysis, and note some tips for myself — and if it helps anyone else reading this, I’ll be glad!
Benefits of Writing
If you are writing about something that requires knowledge and experience, it’s a great way to double down on it.
“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” Albert Einstein
It’s not that you will explain something only in simple terms, but in addition to Albert’s quote, I’d say — If you can’t explain it to somebody else, perhaps you don’t understand it well enough.
Writing will help you clear up and further understand what you already know. If you are writing on technical topics, obviously there’s much to the process of it, you will first have to summarize it in your thoughts, write it down on a paper, and you’ll proof check what you are talking about as well — so writing is a small but great learning loop as well.
In case your native language is not English, which is the case for me — writing can amazingly help you build on your linguistic skills, and that’s a great benefit and I see a lot of people even doing it only because of that. Actually thinking about it now, chances are it will help even if it is your native language.
Writing is also greatly beneficial for cognitive skills, as it requires attention, planning, forethought, and organizational skills. It’s thought reflective and might be calming and even stress-reducing.
Personally, I felt that writing on public platforms for others to read can help a lot with social skills as well, improving your day-to-day interaction, and communication, and at least for me it’s great for lessening social anxiety if you ever experienced it.
One more thing that writing can greatly affect, is your productivity. If you have some free time on your hands, writing articles will give the feeling of being more productive, not only regarding writing itself — but in general. It can change your mindset if you ever struggle with productivity, and it will let you drive more and aim to do more in your day-to-day life.
Stats, Views, and Reads
I want to summarize my stats so far — in order to also have a better picture for myself, but also it might benefit other Medium contributors.
Views and Reads
I started getting decent views on the 19th of May.
I’ve read that a 20–30% Reads/Views ratio is great — this metric for me, resulted in roughly 32%. I’m not sure about the Fans part though, as calculating the number of Claps across my stories — this didn’t add up.
I’ll post even the entire list of the articles that I wrote so far.
As you can see, I didn’t start writing 10 days ago — but in April. Yet for some reason, my audience started growing indeed in the last 10 days only. I’ll contribute this to the Medium algorithm, as obviously, I didn’t expect to start getting views right away. Actually, getting a relatively high amount of views after just a month is still shocking for me.
From the above you can see that these stories resulted in the most views:
- “Why I stopped using Gmail — and why should you too”
- “Responsibilities of a Senior Software Engineer”
- “Javascript Concepts Every Programmer Should Know”
- “Javascript Engineering: The Science Behind”
Publications
Obviously, being able to get your stories shown in publications is a great way to grow your audience.
This is something that I’m yet to see, as all of the articles above, generated interest without being published anywhere. Actually, only at the time of writing this story, I started getting notes from Medium publications, members, and owners on the above four articles, for me to add them to their publication. Which is again amazing! Now that some of these are published, I’m looking forward to seeing how the stats change.
This also brings me to the conclusion that views attract views, for obvious reasons.
If your content is good, there’s no need to promote it in order to get to your audience. Medium, kudos again for your algorithms and delivering content to relevant readers.
Chosen for Further Distribution
So far what I’ve noticed is that all the stories that got Chosen for Further Distribution performed well. I’d assume stories aren’t hand-picked by medium moderators, but that there’s an algorithm in the background.
All the stories of mine, that were poorly written and didn’t promote any relevant or remotely quality content — simply didn’t get chosen.
This is something that you really should aim for all your stories — and it can also serve as great feedback from Medium itself, it’s in a way saying whether your content is considered to be good, so you can even adapt your writing to a degree based alone on this.
Writing from Personal Experience
One more thing that I can note is that all the stories that I wrote in a personal tone and from experience, performed well.
It doesn’t have to be something personal but you should be writing from experience, expressing your own views.
This is something that I didn’t just notice in my stories alone, but in all the other content you can find on Medium.
Community
Medium indeed is a community, not only a platform. Leaving notes and comments on others’ stories, and getting a genuine response feels great.
Growing with and into a community and a circle of people, whom you share common views with, is definitely something that will benefit your audience as well. But don’t abuse this solely for the reason of growing your audience.
Always be sincere and genuine to yourself and others.
The above is what I noticed so far on my journey of becoming a hobbyist writer.
Mainly I’ll be looking forward to whether the aforementioned checks out, it will be useful and interesting to look back and reflect on. Hopefully, it might also be interesting, and of some help and benefit to other Medium readers and writers as well.
Thank you for reading! 🎉
